Removing glasses offers a window into the world of ghosts

There's always another world there when I take my glasses off. A world of indistinctness, of hidden things, patterns that I can only interpret into real objects after long and careful analysis. Every place I go, every action I take, that world stays always barely visible around the frames of my glasses, at the edge of my perception.

I never noticed it when I was young, my eyes could see better so I could make sense of my environment with them alone. As time went on and my prescription became steadily stronger, functioning without correction became ever closer to impossible. By the time I learned to drive I couldn't make out line one of the vision test, so the ever-present need for correction was noted on my license. Prescribed glasses are always a little more efficient than regular sight, and with strong prescriptions the difference gets even higher -- so as my uncorrected vision turned to noise, my corrected vision became far more accurate than average. The paradox's power wasn't lost on me, and made me more conscious of how stunningly detailed the full visual world was, how amazingly much there was to see if you had the tools to see it.

Eventually, then, I discovered the other world there, somewhere near blindness. When I kept on my glasses all possible clarity was there, discrete lines, borders, and dots, individually meaningful to the whole. When I took them off just the opposite, muted shapes, meaningless patterns, blurs that only parsed with memory or intuition. Buildings in the distance turned to blocky wreckage, a nest of trees into the bodies of long extinct dinosaurs.

And people and cars to amorphous ghosts, gliding along all the same paths they had in life.